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June 11-12, 2012

Monday –

The mornings are getting colder here.   Now we’re dipping into the upper 20s for overnight lows.    I haven’t seen it myself, but Missy reports that overhanging roots on the creek are icicles in the mornings.   Luckily, the furnace is over its Santa Fe issues and is working perfectly.

Today was kind of a lazy day.   We spent time inside and out reading and playing scrabble.   (Chased inside occasionally by the wind.  Not as constant and unrelenting as Pagosa Springs, but the gusts here bring fresh mountain chill).   I took a bike ride and on that ride I saw a yellow bellied Marmot!   It was very exciting.   We’ve seen them lots of times off in the distance scurrying for cover.  But this guy stopped about 15 feet from me and just froze.   We stared at each other for a minute, and then he got shy when I got out the camera.    Very neat!

We got to talk to Mom in the afternoon for a bit.  That was fun!   She was with Jeremiah so we had ourselves a nice little 4 person chat.   Makes us miss home…

Tuesday –

Today we brought the truck in for the rotor/brake job.    We dropped the truck off a little after 9 am.    We walked across the street to the visitors center to use the free wifi.   The library didn’t open until 11, so we had some time to kill.   I got my blog post up and did some facebooking.   I also had some frustrating times trying to use my phone only (with 1x) to do some bill paying.  (I won’t do banking or other sensitive stuff on public connections).  It took me almost 30 minutes to pay two bills.   Annoying, but then again….I got time.  :-)

At 10 we started to run out of laptop batteries, so we took a little walk around town.   We went to the post office, and then just enjoyed window shopping in the touristy stores.   Then we headed over to the library at 11 to set up shop.    I got a call that the car was done around noon.   The sway bars were a hit and miss kind of thing.  The stock parts weren’t any shorter, but since ours were very worn and decrepit, we went ahead and installed the new ones.  The rotors were definitely warped.  So now we need to make sure we don’t overheat them with unnecessary braking going down mountains.  (the tech guy pointed out one thing that confused him: the lug nuts on the back wheels aren’t straight and true.   He said he’s never seen that before and doesn’t know what to do about it.  I can’t handle another issue, so I will ignore it and hope it self-heals).

We got back home at around 3:30.   We decided to pick up the dogs and head up the road for a hike in the hills.   If you studied the pictures from our mountain climb, you can see a path way down in a green hilly setting.   That’s where we drove to and parked for our walk with the dogs.    We could hear Mineral Creek off in the distance.  Missy suspected that there might be some decent rapids over yonder.   So we offroaded down to the spot.  It was amazing!   In a crevasse in the earth, there was a section of rapids that looked just like the MN North Shore!   Such a strange feeling to be looking down, almost like into a diorama, to see the rapids.   If you ignored the mountains in the background, you’d totally think you were on the split rock or cascade.   I really enjoyed just sitting there watching the drops on the run.   I miss kayaking.

Oh- I almost forgot!   We saw a Moose!!!!   As we were on our way to our hiking spot, we were behind another truck.   The driver suddenly pulled over to the side of the road and started gesturing wildly.   I didn’t know what he was doing, so we drove on.  10 feet past, we saw a Moose enjoying a swamp snack.    He was maybe 20-30 yards away.   His dark brown color was very obvious in the green swamp.   We had some neat full on face views when our crazy-barking dogs got his attention.    We did get some pictures, so there is proof of this claim.   The Moose and the hike made this an acceptable day!